Murphy’s Sailing Tours Ltd. and Absolute Charters Inc. are complaining to the provincial regulator that clamping down on open-contract services licences would hurt their businesses.

The licences give companies the same flexibility available to carriers in an unregulated market to negotiate financial terms and conditions for multi-day contracts for one or more seasons, said a Gardner Pinfold report made public this fall.

Returning to the “traditional approach would require a carrier to make an application to approve each and every contract absent one obtained through a public tender process,” said nearly identical letters to the provincial Utility and Review Board penned this week by Jason Cooke, a Burchells LLP lawyer.

“This would create significant additional burdens on members of the industry, an industry already confronting some serious challenges.”

Getting rid of open-contract services licences would mean charter operations would lose their confidentiality when filing contracts to the board, he said.

That is “one of the most significant benefits of contract services,” said Cooke, who represents Murphy Sailing Tours and Absolute.

“It would be effectively impossible for an objector to challenge a contract application without knowledge of its terms,” Cooke said.

“The practical effect would likely be that contract services would decline, which would not be to the benefit of either the industry or members of the public using contract services.”

A Mount Uniacke tour bus operator said this fall that his application for an open-contract services licence earlier this year prompted a review of discounting in the industry.

“When we went and filed for it back in January, the red flags went up, as if this could be deemed illegal,” John Furzeland, charter manager at MolegaTours Ltd., said in late September.

The discounting review was slated to take place this month.

But it has been put off without a date while the province looks at changes to regulations surrounding charter bus services in the wake of a massive shakeup in the bus industry.

Montreal’s Groupe Orleans Express, operator of AcadianCoach Lines in New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island and AcadianIntercityCoaches in Nova Scotia, told the Nova Scotia regulator in August that it was abandoning its money-losing service at the end of November.

Trius Tours Ltd. of Charlottetown launched Maritime Bus passenger and parcel service as a replacement this month.

“To change the status quo at this point would create further uncertainty in an industry which has confronted significant upheaval in recent months,” Cooke wrote in his letters to the board, dated Monday.